Thursday, July 30, 2009

Men, women and sex - Part 2**

“If it's healthy for husbands to look at other naked women because it feels good” (end quote)

Although I didn’t actually discuss the health of it, this insightful blogger does raise a good question about the health or ill health of men looking at naked or partially naked women.

In the previous post I postulated that when post pubescent males look at naked women they feel good and that is why some of them do it. They do not usually do it compare to their wives or feel unsatisfied in their current marriage. Theoretically this would probably be seen as a Free Child piece of behaviour.

If this was all that was involved in the process then one could say that this is psychologically healthy. Or at least that there will not really be any psychological damage that should result from looking and then having the feeling.

However one can hypothesize situations where this may not be all that happens. For instance some men will have Parent ego state beliefs that say it is bad to feel like you want to look and worse to even look and then have the FC reaction. These beliefs could be based on some religious system or some other kind of value structure.

When he feels like looking the CP will get involved and tell him he is bad or sinful. In this sense there could be a state of ill health because he has two parts of his personality that is in conflict. The FC urge is not going to stop and thus this will create ongoing psychological disquiet. This could be an example of when looking at naked women would be unhealthy. He would need to come to some sort of truce between the FC want and the Parent belief if he is not to be scarred in the long term.

I must say I feel for such men as it kind of is impossible not to look. In Australia it is not uncommon for females to bath topless at the beach and to wear the ‘thong’ (no not thong you wear on your foot!). It woman is right there in front of you and one would have to be constantly looking away. I assume these men end up just never going to the beach. Even worse if one simply goes to the shopping centre in the summer time there are women dressed in all sorts of ways, some of them in quite sexualised ways. One would be constantly bending their neck so as to get such women out of the line of vision.

If our observant male is in a relationship and his partner has a problem with him looking then there will be another problem created. A relationship problem as I described in my previous post on this topic. So one could also define this as a unhealthy result from the FC want to look.

Other instances when looking may be a problem for the male

1. There are some men who are addicted to pornography in the same way people can be addicted to gambling or drugs. In this way the FC want to look at semi naked women could be seen as a state of ill health because in one way it would be a relapse back into the addiction. Fortunately most men are not addicts as such.

2. Looking at women in a sexual way could at times be objectifying them in the observers mind. This is probably true for some men who are in essence objectophiles and thus the looking could be seen as psychologically unhealthy.

On the other hand all men crave a secure attachment and a loving, caring relationship with a spouse. If you objectify the woman then you can’t have that. Men learn (like women too I suppose) that you can’t have a a loving and caring relationship with an object. They loose out if they objectify women.

3. Some men are misogynists and looking at women in a sexualised way could contribute to their women hating beliefs. An interesting derivative of this is what is known as the Madonna-whore complex. This man typically holds women like his wife, sister or mother with reverence. They are treated with great respect, edified and by and large seen in a non-sexual way. An example of this could Tony Soprano, the good family man who usually treated his wife and daughter with respect (the madonna).

Tony Soprano - Family man

Then as a working man he ran a strip club called Bada Bing. The other females in his life like the girlfriends, prostitutes or strippers were seen as the whores and treated with great disdain.

Tony Soprano at work - Bada Bing

Another movie example was the gangster Tony Montana in the movie Scarface (Excuse me! why are so many gangsters called Tony - Tony Soprano, Tony Montana and ‘Fat Tony’ from the Simpsons!). He treated women with little respect except for his sister who he treated like a princess.

This continued until the end of the movie when he sees her at a night club doing drugs and being lascivious with his business partner. He can’t cope with her transition from Madonna to Whore and he sets about to kill his business partner for defiling her.

Having isolated these types of instances where that natural Free Child desire to look can be unhealthy I think it is safe to say that this only accounts for a small number of men. Most men like women and want the best for their partners and wives. Their desire to look at semi naked women in magazines and so forth is not meant to be offensive to the female nor to denigrate them it just feels like a good thing to do.